I had heard wonderful things about the new Wonder Woman movie. This is after years and year of the movie and T.V. industry telling us that they just couldn’t market Wonder Woman and that not enough people would want to watch a show centered around a female super hero. It has proven so popular that I wasn’t able to see it until the third weekend it was out due to sold-out shows at the times that work best for me. Sold-out morning showing used to never happen. It is getting more common now.

But I spent a large part of the beginning of the show pissed off at the Christianization of the Greek Mythology in the movie. It was very pronounced in the start and even more obvious when Ares tells his own side of it. I really do hate it when movies butcher well-known mythology, and Greek Mythology is perhaps the most well-known in the western world.

Prometheus carving man from clay.

In Greek Mythology, Zeus doesn’t create mankind. Prometheus shapes man out of earth and Athena breathes life into him. Since most of the other good things were given to other creatures, he makes man to walk upright and gives man fire. Zeus is the one who actually didn’t like mankind. This is why Zeus created Pandora, the first woman. Giving her a box filled with misfortune and diseases because he knows that she will eventually become curious enough to open the box and release them on mankind. To top everything else off, in Greek Mythology, Zeus doesn’t create Amazons. They are actually the daughters of Ares and a nymph.

But in Wonder Woman, Zeus is clearly an allegory of the Judeo-Christian God and Ares is an allegory of Lucifer/Satan.

The world is a beautiful paradise and the gods rule it from on high, at the top of Mt.

Amazons

Olympus. Then Zeus creates mankind for the gods to rule over and everything is fine. Only Ares isn’t happy with man and corrupts them. So Zeus makes the Amazon’s to teach mankind love. And everything is good for a while, but then mankind goes back to his former ways.

Then follows a great war in the heavens in which almost all the gods are killed and a much weakened Ares ends up wandering the earth, whispering in the ears of mankind. He is trying to prove that man is not such a wonderful creation and that humans are not good at heart. That he has never had to corrupt anyone. He just points things out and people are free to do as they chose.

If it isn’t obvious, I will break it down.

Zeus, like the Christian God, makes man in his own image.

Zeus makes women latter. This is actually the same but in the movie it is more in line with the biblical creation of women as companions whereas in Greek Mythology, woman is made as a trick to destroy man.

Ares doesn’t like mankind and thinks they are not that great. Much like Lucifer, as an angel, is not pleased with the creation of man and attempts to prove to God that man is not as good as he thinks.

Adam and Eve and Serpent

There is a great war in the heavens in which Ares finds himself reduced and stuck wandering the earth and whispering in people’s ears, much like a fallen angel and Satan at the serpent.

It doesn’t take much to pull off the veil and reveal that the movie of Wonder Woman took the Biblical creation story and the battle between God and Satan and just switched the names out. It also ignored a dichotomy it created. It the world was a beautiful and peaceful place, why would the gods have a god of war? Even after the creation of man and the gods divided duties, why would they create a god of war over people who were, at least at that time, peaceful?

Did no one else watching the movie see these problems? I can’t be the only one for whom they just leapt up off the screen .

When you follow out this logic, Diana becomes a sort of messianic figure, an allegory for

Birth of Diana

Christ. She was shaped from clay by the queen of the Amazons. Then Zeus breathes life into her. Now this is one of the creation stories for her in the comics. But prior to that, she was shaped from clay by the queen but then each of the different Greek deities then gifts her with something different, like the fairies that attend the christening of Sleeping Beauty, thus making her a child of all the gods and not just the child of Zeus. Her function is to extend the love the Amazon’s are supposed to represent and to fight for peace and to protect the world from evil influences where she finds them.

Clearly, the writers are trying to tell the story of God’s creation, of the fall of the Angels, of the actions of Satan, and of the birth of Christ. All hidden under the guise of Wonder Woman. I am going to guess that this could even be a subconscious reason for the movies popularity among certain groups of people.

There is a story about one of Arthur’s knights who is on a mission and he meets a witch who will help him if only he will marry her. He agrees. She resolves his mission and now he must keep his promise. Other versions are where the knight becomes obligated to someone of a higher status who forces him to marry an ugly woman under this other man’s authority.

He is depressed because she is very ugly. She lets him in on a secret. He has to make a choice. She can be beautiful but he must decide when. Does he want her to be beautiful at night, when they are alone together? Then everyone with think he has an ugly wife and feel sorry for him. Or she can be beautiful during the day and everyone will think he is lucky to have such a beautiful wife but she will be ugly at night.

Feeling rather sorry for himself, he decided that it doesn’t really matter to him and tells her to choose which way will make her happier. Her response is, “Oh well, in that case, I would rather be beautiful all the time.” And so she was.

The moral is that men shouldn’t make decisions for women. When you let women make their own decisions, you may end come coming out of it better than if you tried to force her to follow your choices.

The other moral, as it is sometimes done, is based on a riddle the knight failed to answer. What is it that women really want? After failing to answer correctly and having to wed the ugly woman, by letting her choose, he learns the real answer. What women really want is self-determination. The right to make their own choices about their own lives and their own bodies.

Both variations of the moral are nearly identical. The one that says women want and deserve self-determination focuses more on women and letting them make their own decisions. The other saying that men shouldn’t make decisions for women focuses on men and what they shouldn’t do. Either way, I think the story is really appropriate for today’s political climate.

This was actually intended to keep track of my notes on this book as I was reading it. But I think I will share it anyway.

I was hesitant to purchase this book but it did sound like it could be amusing. So I got it. Thus far my feelings for this book is ‘meh’. A noble woman who is summoned from her bathtub and transported, totally naked, half way across a continent shouldn’t be that calm and collected. Even in a world where everyone has a few, various, completely random, magical spells. She also comes off a bit to pragmatic when she puts on the filthy, shirt from someone who had been lugging a wheelbarrow of 200 lbs of potatoes around all day, having spent a portion of that day in a railroad engine car helping the engineer out. I just don’t find anything about this character, Sarah, believable.

I’m now halfway into the book and it is absurd. The problem is, it doesn’t feel like it is absurd on purpose. But it doesn’t feel like it was on purpose. Yes, it feels like the author is trying to be funny and amusing but not that he was deliberately trying to write Fantasy Humor. It ends up seeming absurd in a bad way rather than absurd in an amusing way.

I finished the book on Saturday. The ending pulled the questionable quality of the book out of the water. It ended better than expected. Other than the fact the author didn’t do a very good job of showing the main character’s becoming emotionally entangled so that they end up getting married at the end. It was rather abrupt and sudden. Sarah seemed to have very platonic feelings until she crawls into bed with him. He was clearly attracted to her and had twinges of jealousy but then suddenly he is in love with her. It was abrupt and awkward.

Other than some of the characteristics mentioned above, I did find myself wanting to know what would happen next. At the start it had that feeling of a first book, but by the end I no longer had that feeling. The book didn’t have the editing errors I normally see when a person’s first book is only published in an electronic format. The writing was actually pretty strong and in the end, I think the only real complaint is the author having trouble showing a growing relationship and it didn’t pull off deliberate Fantasy Humor very well.

It did end well enough that I ordered the next book the very next morning.

A Storm of Sword – Stopped reading in the middle when I realized that the entire series was all about people w/ no control over their lives, who were miserable, trying to seize power in order to have some control over their own lives and thereby making everyone else miserable in the process.

The last of the Nightside books, this was a let down. I think the series should have ended where the last book left off. I know people who think is should have ended sooner.

I love the characters. I love the location. I love the fact that the truest evil comes not from evil, twisted entities but rather from the depths of mankind itself. The Nightside, a place where Heaven and Hell agreed to stay out and let humanity go its own way resulted in a very dark and depraved world. Because, in the end, people don’t need something evil to lead them astray, they do a very good job of it all on their own.

This last book felt like Green took a number of ideas he had floating around and just smashed them together since he knew it was the last Nightside tale. There would be no fourth opportunity to explore those stories in that place. The end result felt a bit disjointed, rushed, and under-developed. Of course, it takes place during the entire night before John Taylor’s wedding. So it was rushed, fitting in such a story in a forced time frame.

The thing is, the level of dissatisfaction over the book makes me feel worse than if I hadn’t read it at all. The feeling of, “I’m ready to be done with this,” is rather pervasive. The previous book ends with John as the new Walker and he and Suzy deciding to get married. The only purpose of this book seems to be to make it official. We didn’t really need it at all. If the point was to tie up some loose ends that had been left hanging, at least he could have done it with better care and deliberateness than what we get in this title.